Blog Comments

You're probably right Marc, I did handle the rocks pretty carefully, keeping them submerged the whole time. But as you say, was really cool to see an old friend, especially a favorite.

That's really cool. Always nice to find an old friend long thought lost, and in your case that's a pretty amazing story. Odds are it was in a nook of the rocks during the change over.

Good to be back. I've been enjoying your photos as usual Marc. Gives me a goal to shoot for as a reef keeper and photographer.

Great to see you back in the game again.

LOL, look at how full my truck was, It would have taken 6 trips with my little plane.
And it was a gorgeous day, 80 degrees out. So nice to move a tank without worrying about the livestock freezing.

Yes, the sand was very thoughly rinced, except for a couple cups of seed stock. I did a late night examination with the red flashlight last night and found a few pods, several peanut and tube worms and one baby brittle star, so my micro fauna should be healthy again shortly.

I'm surprised you didn't fly your tank home. looks like a pretty day in Alaska. Did you rinse the sand?

Going to be a while Im Afraid, I have other priorities for the summer. So my goal is to transfer the live stock in October. But I'll be posting updates as I get things built.

sounds cool phil cant wait to see it all come together

Well the bad thing about the 3/4" SCWDs are they can't be taken apart and cleaned which is why your most likely failed something jammed up the gear inside of it and then that was that. The 1" on the other hand can be taken apart and cleaned also the 1" isn't going to restrict the flow as much meaning you will get a more aggressive current from it making it much more appealing to those of us with tanks larger than 40 gallons so that is going to be a better investment for you for sure (plus the cost is very appealing.)

@ cyano: Regarding the chromis, as with any schooling fish, the more you have the more spread out the agression/pecking order and the healthier they all seem to stay. My experience with freshwater fish indicated that 9 was the minimum for small schooling fish. I know a lot of literature says 5 or 6, but 9 or even 12 always seemed to work better for me. But I don't know if 12 chromis might be a bit big for a 75 eventually. Especially since I do want a tang too. One of my dream tanks is a 4' cube with about 30 chromis around a staghorn coral island.

My pump was about the same with the 3/4" SCWD, it switched every 3 seconds. I'm thinking that's why it failed, simply worn out. The 1" SCWD with this pump should run about 90 seconds before switching and have less head loss.

@Midnight: My return pump pushes about 500 gph so that alone wouldn't be much. I've never actually used penductors so don't know how much difference they make. But that might be a good place to start until I can afford a second Vortec, I could always add a power head in the mean time too. And my hermits always enjoyed a good piece of tang poo (not to be confused with pootang!).

I still have it as a matter of fact I stopped using it b/c the pump starting leaking and unfortunately it was not in the sump so I had a freak out "is my tank leaking" moment. It was the 3/4" SCWD but I was using the biggest pump I could with it meaning it switched directions about every 2 seconds. With the mp40 right now it is good but with no water from the other side I don't really get turbulence so I am still considering for the time being putting my Korelia 3 on the other side and running it through a wavemaker time slot on my reef keeper to see if that mixes things up a bit. then again now that I have a bigger sump I may one day reinstall my scwd along with the vortech for some really random flow

I actually may be going fish shopping tomorrow sometime and chromis are definitely on my list of possibilities (along with trying to find a good healthy sticky rose anemone perhaps) but I have always hear horror stories about them killing the weakest ones all the way up the chain of command till there was only one or two left so thats why i asked.

I have always thought of the super pooping yellow tang as being an excellent food source for the corals. not to mention the all day grazing and keeping the rock fairly clean. Phil, what if you did the inlets on one end and a vortech on the other end? Do you think with penductors that would create enough flow?

Thanks cyano
Did you have the 3/4 or 1" SCWD? And what pump were you using?

I had a yellow tang before, up until the power failure last week. And boy did he poop! I'll still have my old back-pack skimmer, and plan to leave room for a Bubble Magus in the sump. The skimmerless tank will be an experiment.

Currently 2 of the chromis are noticably bigger than the third, and they do occassionally pick on the smaller one.

Sounding real good and now you have me excited to see it start coming together! A couple things I wanted to add from my own 75 gallon experience. I have a SCWD in a closed loop and have used it in the tank before but it does not move a lot of water in a 75 gallon (it didn't for me at least) tank I still had to use power heads to get sufficient flow to cut down on dead spots. I recently went with the mp40w and hope to add at least an mp10w as I til that should be sufficient for a 75 gallon without having to spend the additional 200 bucks on another mp40.

I have ran the tank without a protein skimmer before and can honestly say I have never kept a tang alive without one, not saying you can't but they poop....a lot, as my other fish combined don't poop as much as my one yellow tang, it's big and it's frequent. I wasn't sure if you have ever kept a tang before so that was my heads up on that.

With your 3 chromis do you have issues with dominance? I was just wondering as I am thinking of adding some myself.

I'm already started on the new build Hat. I'm in the reasearch stage. I'm re-reading Borneman's book and Picked up a used copy of "A simplified Approch to Natural Reef Aquariums".

Double post.

I'm glad everything turn out okay, Phil. It definitely could have been a lot worst. I really look forward in seeing the build progress of your new setup. I know you'll have lots of pictures.

Just checked up on them on my lunch hour. The wrass was swimming around normally and all the fish were hungry. All the corals and the clam are looking normal too. So it looks like both systems survived relatively unscathed.

Sorry to hear that you have had a bad tank sitting experience. hopefully everything will turn out alright.

That ones on my list. Only 3 more nights to fill up.